We watched Wag the Dog again last night. It’s a blast.

There are only a few people extant who can write dialog like David Mamet. He was kinda alone up there for a while, but then guys like the Coen brothers came along and passed him in the breakdown lane. I think you have to wander back to Coppola to find writers who write this kind of drama, or comedy, or whatever you want to call it. It still sounds like real people talking, almost endlessly, without being boring.

Mamet got stiffed on the credit for writing the screenplay for Wag the Dog, an amusing twist considering the way the movie plot ends up. Some talentless woman got hired to adapt the original book, and the script ended up in the round file. Director Barry Levinson hired Mamet to fix things, and he wrote the whole thing. Levinson wanted to give him the credit. The people who decide such things insisted that the woman not only had to share writing credit, she had to be listed first. Levinson pitched a fit over it with the writer’s guild, but ultimately backed down.

If you’ve seen the movie, you can verify that David Mamet wrote 100% percent of the dialog. You’d know it without being told. Since the movie has no action (it’s a movie about talking about things that don’t happen), dialog represents 100% of the movie. Mamet comes to Hollywood via the New York Stage, so he was the perfect guy to write a movie script about people jabbering at each other in conference rooms, back seats, living rooms, bedrooms, and planes. The movie covers about 7,500 miles as the crow flies, from D.C. to Los Angeles to Nashville and back, and still feels manages to feel claustrophobic. But then again, it’s a movie about people who have never been outdoors during the daytime, and never miss it.

Mamet invented the character of Stanley Motss, who is the whole movie when you get right down to it. How Dustin Hoffman didn’t win an Oscar for it is beyond me, although the Academy  is famous for picking the only hair in a wedding cake most years.

Mamet invented Sargent Schumann, too. He invented all the stuff that happens in Nashville, and almost everything that happens in Hollywood. In short, he has more right to claim credit for the whole story than Larry Beinhart, the author of the book the movie is supposedly based on, never mind Hilary Whatshername.

If you look up the synopsis of the book, Beinhart’s American Hero, it’s a convoluted muddle, a short bus Bourne movie crossed with a Mexican wrestling match. The only kernel of an idea was faking a war to distract from a political problem. In the good old days of real Hollywood, a hack like Beinhart would have gotten a check for $1,000 for the idea, never be heard from again. But Beinhart was grinding an ax over Bush senior’s possible re-election, so he was in with the in crowd.

The movie as it turned out was far more prescient than that. Bush was long gone and Slick Willie made the new plot not only plausible, but on the nose. Hewing too close to actual current events made a lot of people in the punditry mines nervous, so the movie was praised pretty cautiously, and basically ignored at the Oscars. Mamet and Hoffman were robbed. But it’s always better for people to wonder why there is no statue of you, instead of why there is.

The premise of the movie is that if you’re not cynical, you’re not paying attention. And no matter how absurd the Washington/News/Hollywood cabal gets, the stakes are very real.

So watch Wag the Dog, and laugh because something funny is going on, in every sense of the word. And also remember: Skepticism is only the first step on the long road to cynicism, padawan. So bring a change of clothes, and plenty of benzedrine and grappa.